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Report from the Fossil Frontier

Hi Guys!

Well it's been an interesting week out west. Got into Winnette Montana (pop 175)last Monday and the weather was beautiful. On Tuesday it rained all day, then Wednesday, it rained ALL day... The ranchers in the area called it "liquid sunshine" because they have had less than an inch of rain since January and many of them were forced to sell their cows due to lack of grass.

I came to find out that a few weeks before, a rainmaker came to town and wanted to charge the people 15,000 dollars to make it rain. Well the people actually debated about it because this guy had charged the same money a few towns over several years ago and it rained more there than anywhere else in Montana that year. They have been paying him ever since. Now I should point out that this is not any kind of scientific stuff this guy is going to fix the "atmospheric disturbance" that hovers over the town by setting up tubes and such on a hill outside of town.

SO the story finishes up with the fact they decide not to pay him and he leaves saying their attitudes and atmosphere are so screwed up he is not coming back for two years. Then I show up and it rains. Next he takes all the credit for the rain in the Billings newspaper. That night I stand up in the bar and proclaim "the only new person in this town is me and the rain followed me here. You owe me some bucks!!" Lyle (one of the Freemen) yells back "you are getting pretty close to the third S !!". They have hats in this town that say SSS, it stands for Shoot Shovel and SHUT UP!! Needless to say I sat down....

The next few days we checked out some sights around the area with little luck. I have a paintball friend that owns a ranch here and his name is Lark. I brought him an Emag and he wanted to show his friend T-bone from Lewistown so he brings the Emag right into the restaurant. Only in Montana can you show off a gun in a restaurant and no one notices.

I am now outside of Lusk Wyoming staying in a cabin on a friends ranch. I’ll be here for the next few weeks and as soon as I get my computer system on the Internet I’ll post some pics. Right now I’m on the ranchers computer.

Glad to see you all are keeping things lively without going overboard!

In the field,

AGD

This is what it looks like out here, we will look along the ridge for fossils

They don't do anything small in Montana, this is the BIG BUD tractor that can pull
a 60 foot wide tilling bar. This one has over 600 horsepower. I am going to send this to Budd Orr

Tom; if you saw any big (2-3-400ft) towers with dish antennae all over them, likely they are the ones I put up. Microwave tele-communications was all the rage in the early '80s. If you have Sprint or MCI, you are using the gear I installed!

Didn't you wish you had a rifle for all those Prairie Dogs out there! Oh, by the way, I drove a Steiger which is even larger than that tractor. Pulled a no-till drill, a machine you could appreciate for it's technically complex simplicity